Trí labra ata ferr túa...

I know, I know. I've been a real Debbie Downer (you should excuse the phrase) recently.

But. But!

Things are better.

Period has started, so the hormonal bombardment has eased. Food and medication in regular doses is happening. I actually have energy and motivation to tackle the disaster area my house is at the moment. And my syllabus. Oy vey, gevalt, even. My syllabus. I'm trying something new incorporating Lies My Teacher Told Me and I'm getting very A Beautiful Mind meets Fred Burkle in season 2 of Angel with the writing on the walls. (Is it so bad that I want an entire wall of the office done in blackboard paint? Is it so very weird? Don't answer that.)

Thanks to everyone who commented, either here or in some other medium. It's not why I make the posts (okay, it's mostly not why I make the posts), but they're appreciated anyway.

I'm (re-)instituting the practice of writing for ten minutes at the beginning of every composition class this semester. Students can write about whatever they want, but for the inevitable "I don't know what to write about" whiners, I like to have a quote handy for a prompt.

So, fling your favorite quotes at me, folks! I'd like to get as wide a variety of viewpoints as possible.

Okay, one of my online students has checked in already, and she has begun to suck up: "Do you have a favorite manuscript you've translated?" Why, yes, yes I do. Let me tell you John of Salisbury's tale of Thomas Becket's assassination. "Once upon a time there was a way awesome archbishop, a rat bastard of a knight named FitzUrse, and a dreadfully, ahem, misguided king..."

Sekrit Teecher Stuff: Sucking up, done correctly, works. Hee. :)

So I'm doing the online training for Axia. To my students, I will not be a teacher, or even an instructor. I will be a facilitator. Barf. *eyeroll*

I just sent off the answers to an online interview for Axia College of University of Phoenix. Has this been a humongous mistake?

Does anybody have any better suggestions?

Grading essays...

"After my father was incarcerated, we were able to start a relationship." (Emphasis mine.)

Bless her--and him.

I love it when I manage to work a quote from The Princess Bride into my lectures...

Despite having said what I said last week about teachers having a tough job, I'd love to scream this at some of my "collegues":

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE HERE, THEN DON'T BE HERE! For crying out loud, free up the job for someone who actually likes teaching!

It's an age old problem. The default career for the academe is teaching, but so many scholars are so poorly suited to it.

I just sat here in my shared office and listened to one of them rake a relatively good kid with all his ducks in a row over the coals because he didn't jump through the strange and elaborate hoops she requires for excusing an absence, which, by the way, she does not seem to have explained in-class. Student A must call  a classmate, Student B. (The student should not make arrangements to meet with classmates because he might not be able to read the other students' handwriting.) Then Student A should copy down what Student B says were in the notes that day. Then Student A must call my collegues's voice mail and tell her everything that Student B told him. Oh, and Student A shouldn't bother to try to keep up with the reading, because the syllabus isn't reliable.

I had to leave the room before my head exploded on that last one.

We need some sort of work for academics who are unsuited to teaching. It used to be that if you could interest a patron in your research, you'd be set, much like the poets, painters, and playwrights of old. Patrons are a little thin on the ground these days. So are their modern equivalents, research fellowships. Maybe some sort of park, out in Montana. They could assume their rigid, solitary, anti-social little ways and not manage to completely sour generation after generation on education.

Snagged from elkor, who got it from webquatch.



Damn. Right.

I'm bored and lonely. I hate being at home alone. Especially when there are plenty of chores I ought to be doing, and I have absolutely no motivation to do any of them.

Graded research papers last night. Ohhh boy. Even though I know I told the class "every time you paraphrase, summarize, quote, or otherwise borrow from another source, YOU MUST CITE IT," no less than five times, and even devoted an entire 3-hour class to the subject, I had to hand back at least half the papers as unacceptable. They had Works Cited pages, but no citations. WTF? *headdesk* And don't get me started on people who cited, but who couldn't manage to follow MLA format.

I really don't understand why so many students think MLA is so difficult. It's the most straightforward documentation system out there. It's sure as hell a lot easier than Chicago/Turabian. You write something you paraphrased, summarized, quoted, or otherwise borrowed from someone else, you just put their name and the page number after what you borrowed like so (Smith-Jones 54). You don't have to interrupt your reading to scan down the page to a footnote. You don't have to flip to the end to check out an endnote. Name, page number. That's it. No page number? No problem. Just put in the article name in its place (Smith-Jones "Woman Guns Down English Class"). It gets even easier if you lead in with the author, for example: Smith-Jones feels that too many students convince themselves that the MLA format is far more difficult than it actually is (87). See that? That's just the page number. You can do that, if you name the author in your statement. Isn't that cool?

Why is this so difficult?

This group was not as good as the first session folks. A lot more tardiness and absences. (Which explains some of the MLA problem--if they didn't attend class, they didn't get the message.) A much greater sense of entitlement. They wanted to be spoon-fed everything like they were in 101. (This was a 102 class--they should have learned all the documentation stuff in 101.)

Whatever happened to taking responsibility for one's own education? If you don't know something, you look it up. I gave them books and resources. They could email me if they had any questions. I don't know what else I could have done. The next crowd is getting the message loud and clear, though: if you don't cite, you fail. Period.